libMXF

libMXF is a low-level C library for reading and writing the SMPTE ST 377-1 MXF file format.

libMXF and the associated libMXF++ C++ wrapper library are used in the bmx project.

libMXF was originally developed as part of the Ingex Project where it supported MXF transfer, playback and storage applications. libMXF was also used in the BBC Archive Preservation Project to migrate BBC archive content from video tapes to files.

The MXFDump MXF text dumper utility from the AAF SDK is provided in this project for convenience.

Examples

A number of applications and library code can be found in the examples directory. These are not part of the core library and are not required to build libMXF++ or bmx.

• archive: library code and utilities used in the BBC Archive Preservation Project.
• avidmxfinfo: library and utility for extracting metadata about Avid MXF OP-Atom files. This utility has been superseded by mxf2raw in the bmx project.
• reader: library code used by the Ingex Player for reading MXF files.
• transfertop2: utilities used in the TransferToP2 application to allow edited sequences to be transferred from an editing system to a P2 card.
• vlc: legacy code that was written to test how easy it would be to support MXF in VLC.
• writeaviddv50: example utility for writing DV 50 MBit/s video in Avid MXF OP-Atom files.
• writeavidmxf: library code and utility for writing Avid MXF OP-Atom files. This utility has been superseded by raw2bmx in the bmx project.

Build and Installation

libMXF is developed on Ubuntu Linux but is supported on other Unix-like systems using the autotools build system. A set of Microsoft Visual C++ project files are provided for Windows.

Dependencies

The following libraries must be installed to build libMXF. The (Ubuntu) debian package names and versions are shown in brackets.

• uuid, Unix-like systems only (uuid-dev)

Unix-like Systems Build

Install the development versions of the dependency libraries. The libMXF library and example applications can then be built from source using autotools as follows,

./autogen.sh
./configure
make

Run

./configure -h

to see a list of build configuration options.

A number of --disable-* options are provided for disabling all examples (--disable-examples) or specific ones (e.g. --disable-writeavidmxf). The --disable-examples option can be combined with --enable-* options to enable specific examples. The bmx project does not require the examples and therefore libMXF can be configured using --disable-examples.

There are a number of core library and example regression tests that can be run using

make check

Finally, the core library and examples can be installed using

sudo make install

To avoid library link errors similar to "error while loading shared libraries" when building libMXF++ or bmx run

sudo /sbin/ldconfig

to update the runtime linker cache after installation.

Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Build

The Visual Studio 2010 build solution and project files can be found in the msvc_build/vs10 directory. These files can be upgraded to any more recent version when importing into the IDE.

The main build solution file is libMXF-All.sln. It is used to build the library and example applications.

The build depends on the mxf_scm_version.h header file in the root directory to provide the most recent git commit identifier. This file is generated automatically using the gen_scm_version.sh script when building using autotools and is included in the source distribution package. You are likely missing this file if you are using the source code directly from the git repository then and will need to create it manually.

The MXFDump.sln build solution file is used to build the MXFDump text dumper tool.

Source and Binary Distributions

Source distributions and Windows binaries are made available on SourceForge.

License

The libMXF library is provided under the BSD 3-clause license. See the COPYING file provided with this library for more details.